Contents

Surveying the major themes and historical trajectories of the exhibition Art Expanded, 1958–1978, curator Eric Crosby provides an introduction to the Walker Art Center’s deep holdings from this transformational period in history when artists and thinkers upended traditional media and tested art’s evolving status as object, information, and experience. The Walker’s renowned collection of Fluxus event scores and multiples serves as a through line in the show, testifying to the period’s innovations and its unruly spirit of artistic reinvention.

Dissecting many of the group’s text-based artworks and publication projects, art historian Natilee Harren traces the terms “intermedia” and “rear-guard” to advance a revisionist position about the history of Fluxus. As Harren argues, the emergence of Fluxus occurred at a critical moment when the balances had not yet tipped from the modern to the postmodern age. According to her analysis, the work undertaken by Dick Higgins and George Macuinas to theorize and chart their way out of a linearly unfolding art history helped to set the stage for this transition, and delineated the “primeval ground on which the foundation of much contemporary art has been laid.”

Beginning with the example of his iconic 1969 work Schlitten (Sled), Joseph Beuys expert Maja Wismer traces out the patterns at play in Beuys’s prolific body of multiples produced between 1965 and his death in 1986. Wismer discusses the artist’s use of the multiple form across his career, citing the ways in which the multiples both complement and expand his artistic practice. Wismer describes Beuys’s multiples as akin to “humus,” writing that these works “materialize a variety of artistic gestures that exist discreetly as objects while also providing fodder to other projects, becoming elements that decompose or morph in and out of other forms across the totality of his artistic production.”

We [would take] turns shooting. It was an amazing feeling shooting at a painting and watching it transform itself into a new being. It was not only EXCITING and SEXY, but TRAGIC—as though one were witnessing a birth and a death at the same moment. It was a MYSTERIOUS event that completely captivated anyone who shot. —Niki de Saint Phalle

In 1962, Allan Kaprow visited the Twin Cities at the invitation of the Walker’s Center Arts Council. Following his visit, the artist conceived a new Happening, staged in November of that year inside the Lehmann family mushroom caves in St. Paul. Taken from the Walker’s rich archival holdings, this look into Kaprow’s Happening aims to capture an ephemeral event and understand an art form through original documents, press clippings, correspondence, and never-before-published photographs of Mushroom.

The Walker’s 2009 acquisition of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection brought thousands of objects into the museum’s permanent collection, from costume pieces to stage sets, backdrops, and ephemera. Abigail Sebaly, former Cunningham Research Fellow at the Walker, takes Robert Rauschenberg’s belt designed for Carolyn Brown to wear during the dance Aeon (1961) as a point of diversion, seeking to answer the question: what we can learn about Cunningham’s collaborative dance practice from just one remnant? Looking at the object through multiple viewpoints, Sebaly proposes ways that we might use these pieces to recall, interpret, and preserve Cunningham’s work.

Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia (which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means), the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for? —Dick Higgins

Taking as her starting point an evening in March 1966, when gunshots rang out in an outdoor courtyard at the Walker Art Center, art historian Nicole L. Woods traces the life of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Untitled from Edition MAT 64 (1964). The work is one of the artist’s iconic shot paintings, made as part of a series of multiples produced by Daniel Spoerri’s publishing outfit Multiplication d’Art Transformable. Contextualizing the Walker’s piece within the series, Woods discusses the artist’s approach to audience activation, collaboration, and catharsis.

I’ve always tried to bring art into real time—like performance—where it will change because of someone’s presence. —Robert Rauschenberg

The 1967 Walker exhibition Light/Motion/Space inducted audiences into the dazzling world of light-as-medium. Featuring light-based art from the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, the show broke attendance records at the Walker and at its subsequent venue, the Milwaukee Art Center. Looking back through historical photographs pulled from the archives and new documentation of recently conserved works of art, art historian Tina Rivers Ryan acts as our guide through this groundbreaking exhibition. The archival capsule includes original installation images from the era as well as new moving and still images of works from the Walker’s collection.

Tony Conrad’s Long String Drone (1972) is a musical instrument with a solitary purpose—the creation of a sustained drone chord. Using this instrument as a point of departure, Walker fellow Liz Glass traces a path through Conrad’s musical experiments of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including his work with the Theatre of Eternal Music, his solo compositions, and his active engagement with New York’s musical and artistic avant-gardes. Glass focuses on the artist’s ideological and conceptual positions seen through the lens of the drone, finding connections between his diverse experiments.

For the inaugural exhibition in the Walker’s Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed building, which opened its doors in 1971, artists were invited to work on-site and create works responding to, for the first time, the Walker’s new home. Works for New Spaces included more than twenty artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, Sam Gilliam, and Lynda Benglis. This collection of materials from the Walker’s archive looks at the creation of Benglis’s site-specific installation work Adhesive Products, documenting the artist’s intriguing process and innovative approach to materials through photographic, video, and audio documents.

Jack Smith’s richly colored feature-length jaunt through the mythological world of Normal Love is the focus of an essay by the Walker’s Benston Film Scholar Isla Leaver-Yap. Examining the complex life of the film, which was continuously reedited—at times during the artist’s live performances, being cut and respliced as it fed through the film projector—Leaver-Yap takes on Normal Love’s deployment of color, its depiction of mock violence, and its portrayal of the deviant “Other,” set within Smith’s deliberately fashioned, fantastical world of film.

In 1969, artist Barry Le Va was invited to create an installation for the Walker Art Center’s soon-to-be-demolished building. Le Va’s intervention of broken glass, mineral oil, and red oxide powder was made in secret after the site had already been closed to the public. Beginning with this cryptic installation, Mike Maizels discusses the artist’s interest in the “clue” and his affinity for Sherlock Holmes, interpreting the Le Va’s work in relationship to the nineteenth-century ideal of the knowable world and the twentieth-century collapse of that model.

We hungered for music almost seething beyond control—or even something just beyond music, a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machinery across abrupt and torrential seas of pounding blood. —Tony Conrad